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  • Title: Two routes, same destination.
    Author: Blayo C.
    Journal: Entre Nous Cph Den; 1992 May; (20):3-4. PubMed ID: 12222229.
    Abstract:
    The large family has been disappearing in Europe since 1950. Family size narrowed at a time when reduction of high-parity births was being counterbalanced by an increase of 1st and 2nd-born children. When the number of births of 1st and 2nd children stopped increasing. 2-child families became dominant. The effect on fertility of this decrease in marriage has been neutralized by an increase in births outside marriage. Today the disappearance of large families is being accompanied in some countries by an increase in the number of childless families, the 2 phenomena uniting to produce very low fertility rates. Contemporary women of age 35 have an average of between 1.4 and 2.1 children, far from the fertility rate of women born 20 years earlier who had 2-3 children on average. Generally in the West abortion is more frequent in young women, unmarried women, childless women, and women who have not had an abortion before. Conversely, in Eastern Europe the majority of abortions are performed for married women, women over 25, women with at least 1 child, and women have had an abortion before. The average frequency of abortion remains relatively high: more than 1 abortion/woman everywhere and 6 abortions/woman in Romania. Hungary is apparently the only country in Eastern Europe where there has been a distinct change in contraceptive usage resulting in a reduction of the average number of abortions from 2.8 in 1969 to 1.2 in 1989. In East Germany contraception improved eventually, but abortion had been even more widespread than in Hungary, as was also the case in Czechoslovakia where the abortion rate has also fallen in recent years. In Romania, 1 million abortions were carried out in 1990 which prevented at least 500,000 births. In Yugoslavia and Romania abortion tends to become the only method of birth control.
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